Notes from Hampstead, page 5
On first reading, her removal by the god Apollo, at the point of greatest danger, appalls me. (She is transported to the realm of the gods, there to live in eternal bliss.) The justification he gives for this: she was just the instrument of the gods, who used her to set the Greeks and the Trojans on one another. Humans were too wicked and there were too many of them, so what Helen brought about was also in line with the gods’ intentions. It ends up in a ghastly happy ending. Orestes marries the daughter of the very Helen whom he had just threatened to murder.
If these scenes are not the scorn of a god hater, then they make no sense. No diatribe against the gods could be more affecting. Granted that at the last moment Apollo saves Orestes, whom he had incited to matricide. In the logic of the play, Apollo brings on a kind of apotheosis at the end. But with the end of Helen, with the end of the Trojan War, in the house of the murdered Agamemnon the full measure of the gods’ wickedness is taken, and fairest Helen is now one of them.
Helen: Euripides
The action takes place at the grave of Proteus. At Hera’s behest, the real Helen has been abducted to Egypt and has been living there for seventeen years. Everything that has occurred meanwhile at Troy actually involved an apparition of Helen, her double, with whom Menelaus has now begun the journey home. A shipwreck lands him on the coast of Egypt, and he encounters the true Helen dressed in rags. She is being wooed by the king of the country, Proteus’s son, but she resists him; for this reason he threatens death to any Greek who lands. When Helen and Menelaus recognize each other, there is only one way for them to escape: they say that Menelaus is dead. Menelaus, himself in rags, plays the messenger of his own death, and Helen convinces the enemy king that she can become his wife under one condition, that a shipboard funeral for Menelaus be held on the open sea. Then she will be free to become the barbarians’ queen. For the funeral sacrificial offerings, she and the false messenger (in fact, Menelaus) are granted a ship with oarsmen. They both board the ship, along with the shipwrecked Greeks, who have been hiding on the coast. Once on the high seas the crew is overpowered and the couple escape.
The crux of the drama is a living person who is pronounced dead and plays the part of another against his enemy, a new variation on the central theme of Greek tragedy. Since the hero is really alive and the reports of his death are feigned, the outcome is positive.
This “appearance” of the dead Menelaus is a curious extension and reversal of the apparition of the false Helen, who has hardly left the scene when it is decided that Menelaus is no longer alive. Only thus can he win back the real Helen and return home with her.
The Trojan War and all that came after it was no more than a continuation of the intrigue between Hera and Aphrodite. The actions of the gods are emotionally less offensive to us when we see the gods simply as the true powers that still hold sway over our earthly rulers. They are no different from them; they have the same characteristics and treat kings just as kings treat their own subjects and slaves. But they have also decided on war, because there are too many mortals.
For J.-M., every woman is more than any man, even the lowest, most hard-bitten outcast of a woman, and without hesitating he would throw a genius to a whore to devour and still fear he had wronged her. His Christianity, his humility, his feeling of being a sinner make him put all women in the right, because he is a man.
If you were a hundred years old, you would be so well understood that everything would be wrong again.
I know nothing, and I know least of all what I have found out myself.
What does this mean? That I must find it out again? Or that it only has meaning when others rediscover it?
1965
To find your spiritual unity again, to know what you are thinking about, to pry figures from the dreams of decades, consort with them, entrust your life to them, lose your fear of them.
I have read my old sentences again; they are no longer mine. Since they were printed a piece of my life has fallen away from me.
The public sucks the blood from a man’s soul, and what is left is just a shadow, which bows down to them.
False acquaintances and expectations still surround him like a wall of vileness. Until it collapses not a single truth will be granted him.
To bring past years to present moments.
The young person, delighted by the countless idiotic remarks he is allowed to make—suddenly he sees his great future before him.
Loneliness, the sword we draw against those who love us. The cruelty that horrified me in Picasso was my own; still, he was able to protect her from himself with his enormous activity. But I? With what?
Behind every woman he likes talking to he sees a literary figure. He surrounds himself with the elect society of such people. It is obvious he hasn’t a clue about real people. His life is led exclusively in the conceptual realm, and his only passion is getting ahead. A thinker who can’t start from the concrete is no thinker for me, and a single fragment, a single phrase of a Greek philosopher of whom nothing else survives is more to me than all the works of the living A.
A thinker must forget that he is clever, else no matter what the field he will think only about his own cleverness.
What happens to names in all their relations? The sole accomplishment of certain minds is pulling together all sorts of names. While this might come naturally and gradually to most people, these types do it with force. It cannot be denied that in this way things sometimes come about that might not have otherwise.
For names are spiteful and greedy and cannot leave each other alone for a moment. They bite off whole chunks of each other like the most predatory fish. They sense, more than see, each other’s presence. It is unthinkable that they could quietly look at one another. They are potentates, pretentious and irreplaceable, and their pervasiveness makes them more dangerous.
An insecure name is not a name, or it is felt to be a freak by the others. When exposed, some names get frightened and try to hide. If they can, they gather strength in darkness and become invincible. Other names, swallowed whole by bigger ones, prove indigestible. The time can come when they are all that remains of their predator, for, like a dangerous parasite, they have destroyed him from within.
One might ask what makes man so addicted to names, why he becomes a slave to them, inside and out.
A conversation about a name we know absolutely nothing about. The way it comes up in the conversation (which we overhear), how often and when it is mentioned again, after having been just “he” for a while.
We write because we cannot speak out loud to ourselves. Speaking to others leads to the most unpredictable estrangements. They gradually lose their own separate existence because of all the countless words with which we attack and overpower them. A kind of slow murder, it is among the most terrible things in human life. It is like someone’s pressing down to close off our air passages but taking years until we stop breathing entirely. We stay more innocent when we write.
“I know what you mean.” A catchphrase of this psychologizing time, really signifying that we have given up trying to understand the other person before we have even heard him. For we have understood everyone before they have even said a thing.
It is necessary that we leave our learning alone from time to time, that we put it away, not use it, almost forget it. It is precisely this compulsive quality of much learning that makes it necessary to let air into it, loosen it, fill it with the breath of years. It can be part of our nature only when it has given up its compulsiveness.
Most people say “God” to hide from themselves.
Love: a snake with two heads that unceasingly keep watch on each other.
A person is good even when all praise him for being so.
A country where everyone walks backward, to keep an eye on themselves. A country where all turn their backs on one another: fear of eyes.
First, only misunderstandings are left. These will die away; then the work will remain.
A labyrinth made of all the paths one has taken.
She can forget the same thing a hundred times: how he envies her that!
A man who on his own must make up for all the wars he once evaded.
His timidity about bringing any more hopelessness into the world, even by the most honest work, has grown insuperable. How does he differ from Gogol, with his flaming fears?
You have described so many things that move you. Have you left out the most important?
That raving maniac in Munich, placing the hope of the world on Alexander and the diadoches (relief troops), on Augustus.
In Nestroy, you think, you have all Austria. You are deceived; in him you have the delight one finds in malice.
The special interconnection of the social classes in Nestroy, more clearly outlined than anywhere else. Flattery and guile, the forms flattery takes, and the schemes of double-crossers.
Words in Nestroy that I never even knew were Austrian, many of my naive and natural words—I read in the notes with astonishment what they mean.
In the sixth book of the life of Apollonius of Tyana the discussion of the animal gods of Egypt. Apollonius attacks the naked Ethiopians’ ways and derides their animal gods. This angers them, and in response they argue that the customs of the Greeks (the scourging of young men in Sparta) seem to them absurd and undignified. They cannot decide on this point and no one’s mind is changed.
What I like in the account of Apollonius’s life is the unbroken variety of gods, despite many echoes of Christianity (contempt for money, violence, and sex).
What I don’t like are all the stories of his second sight. This was probably crucial to the godlike qualities ascribed to him. There are intellectual miracles of a different sort from Christ’s, showing off his philosophic superiority: Apollonius always knows best.
In this role he meets secular rulers on an equal level, even Romans like Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. Far from despising power, he wants to influence it for good.
His falling out with Euphrates, one of his closest and most important pupils, is traced to Euphrates’ love of money. This quarrel has disturbing aspects, and though Euphrates’ villainy is held accountable as far as the argument is concerned, we are never quite convinced of Apollonius’s greater virtue.
A drama that overplays the differences in size among people. People are as different from one another as if they were dogs.
The avaricious, who conceal themselves so well that eventually they disappear.
How much we can ask of one person simply because we despise the others.
A.’s art: to say as much as possible as cleverly as possible for as long as possible, without ever saying one word that really strikes the spirit. So I loathe him even more than if he had nothing to say at all.
The infusion of Platonism in Cervantes is interesting only in the places where it becomes negative. When ideas are delusion, they lose the hollow, worn-out falseness they have accreted in the course of an overlong literary tradition. Of course, this is the great thing about Don Quixote: the idea and the ideal as madness, in all its consequences, uncovered and skewered. Whether this is ridiculous or not is not the issue: to me it seems terribly serious.
The moral quality of Cervantes is his desperate attempt to cope with the wretched circumstances of his daily life, his conforming to the official conventions of the powers of his time. This is why he is careful that virtue wins out and why he behaves like a Christian. Fortunately his substance, the misery of his real life, is so immeasurably great that conformism could never quite smother it.
Tremendous affection for Cervantes because he knew better than the conventional wisdom of his age and because his hypocrisy, which perhaps he himself didn’t see through, is nonetheless transparent. I admire his spatial breadth; his fate, which so drove him hither and yon, gave him breadth instead of lessening him. Also I love the fact that he became known so late and that despite, or even because of, this he never gave up hope. Despite the many falsifications of life that he allowed into his “ideal” tales, he loved life as it is.
For me, this is the sole criterion of the epic talent: a knowledge of life even at its most horrific, a passionate love for it nonetheless, a love that never despairs, for it is inviolable even in its desperation. Nor is it really tied to a belief, for it originates in the variety of life, its unknown, astonishing, wondrous variety, its unpredictable twists and turns. For those who cannot stop pursuing life, it changes in the pursuit into a hundred new, overwhelmingly remarkable creatures; and for those who just as tirelessly chase after all hundred of them, they will change into a thousand others, all just as new.
The superior “higher” people in Cervantes’ novellas are no less “high” than in Shakespeare. But it is welcome when, in Cervantes, the children of these higher characters run off for at least a few years of “low” living. The young nobleman who for love becomes a gypsy (though his lover turns out not to be a gypsy after all) or the young man in “The Highborn Barn Maid” who bolts for freedom, returning three years later without his upper-class parents’ suspecting where he really was. If we could only know what lies he tells them before running off again! With Cervantes, love is really a “lowlife” concern, but to become famous for knowing it so well, he sets the “high” impossibly high, to flatter those who could be his patrons. But there is more here than mere flattery: he would rather be in their shoes. Should we think it lucky that his wretched lot never did improve?
We really cannot say. The effect of privation on invention is different with everyone, and without knowing the person at hand well, we will never know whether there was too much or too little of it, whether it helped or hindered the power of invention.
A person escapes fame by changing names but gets more famous with every one.
As long as I am writing I feel safe. Perhaps I write for just that reason. But it doesn’t matter what I write. It’s important only that I not stop. It can be anything as long as it is for me, not a letter or something imposed or required from outside. But if I have not written for a few days I become confused, desperate, down, vulnerable, mistrustful, threatened by a hundred perils.
I know that everything is changing, and because I feel the ineluctable coming of the new, I turn to the old wherever I can find it. It might be that I just want to save and preserve it because I can’t bear the passing of anything. But it could also be that I am testing it, to use against death, still unbeaten.
Other writers have written memoirs. Memoirs attract me too. I just find it hard to take them seriously enough, given the omnipresence of death.
Perhaps, too, I fear diluting the seriousness and sincerity of my thinking by revealing its sources in my life. It is unimportant how I have arrived at something that concerns everyone as well as myself. So I would need to write memoirs in a way that would reinforce my convictions in the eyes of others. I still mistrust the selective cleverness of any new insight. Thus, I don’t pay enough attention to formal speculations on the renewal of an art form that once was my own. They seem like game playing. I like games well enough but I don’t want to forfeit any of my real goals to them. I could try saying: Forget death for a year and use this year for everything you have neglected on account of it. But can I? Can I really?
The figure of a lover who suddenly is struck with the horrible realization that others are lovers too. The minute he can no longer deny the truth of this, as soon as he sees it, his own emotion dissolves.
The variety of Stendhal’s travel books. His apodictic pronouncements and judgments. His passion for fictional national characteristics and for famous people. His even greater passion for victims and women. His naiveté: not one of his emotions embarrasses him. His love of disguises, at least in names. We like him because he says it all. He doesn’t try to make every little thing conform to his own vanity. Though full of reminiscences, Stendahl doesn’t get bogged down in them. His reminiscing has that rarest quality, open-endedness. He is always finding something new because he loves all kinds of things. He is often delighted. No matter what his good fortune, he never feels guilty. He doesn’t tire us with long discussions, because he hates the theoretical. His thinking is lively, but he sticks to that which he himself has felt. He does not live without gods, but they come from all kinds of spheres, and it never occurs to him to relate them by family or marriage. He sees cities only if he finds people in them. He doesn’t let a good story go untold. He writes a great deal, but is never pompous. The absence of religion keeps things light.
Stendhal was not my bible, but among writers he was my savior. I have certainly not read all of him, let alone more than once. But I have never opened anything by him without feeling light and bright. He was not my law. But he was my freedom, and whenever I felt smothered I found it in him. I owe him far more than I owe those who influenced me. Without Cervantes, without Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Büchner, I would be nothing, spirit without fire or contour. But I could live only because there is Stendhal. He is my justification and my love of life.
I will never succumb to adjectives, especially in threes. They are Proust’s Orientalism, his love of jewels. These say nothing to me, for I love all stones. The “precious” stones for Proust are the aristocrats among his characters. My “aristocrats” are those unknown people of “the beginning”: bushmen, Aranda, Tierra del Fuegans, the Ainu. My “aristocrats” are all those who still live by myths, who would be lost without them. (And now they are, mostly.) The society in which Proust made his way, his snobbishness, was his way of experiencing the world. That world leaves me cold. I am only interested in it when I read him or Saint-Simon.
All the people we have known return under new names, in unexpected circumstances. We look at them questioningly, hopefully: don’t they recognize us, since we recognize them?
Perhaps people are able to distinguish only among a discrete number of faces, and when that number is exceeded, perhaps after a certain age they are receptive only to the old faces they already know, and in the new see only those.
